Only Fire Forges Iron:

The Architectual Drawings of Michelangelo

PATRICK LYNCH

Patrick Lynch is principal of Patrick Lynch architects and he teaches at Kingston University and The Architectural Association. He studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge and L'Ecole d'Architecture de Lyon.

'Sol pur col foco il fabbro il ferro' (Only fire forges iron/to match the beauty shaped within the mind) Michelangelo, Sonnet 62'

The architectural drawings of Michelangelo depict spaces and parts of buildings, often staircases and archways or desks, and on the same sheet of paper he also drew fragments of human figures, arms, legs, torsos, heads, etc. I believe that this suggests his concern for the actual lived experience of human situations and reveals the primary importance of corporeality and perception in his work. Michelangelo was less concerned with making buildings look like human bodies, and with the implied relationship this had in the Renaissance with divine geometry and cosmology. I contend that his drawing practice reveals his concerns for the relationships between the material presence of phenomena and the articulation of ideas and forms which he considered to be latent within places, situations and things.

Michelangelo criticized the contemporary practice of replicating building designs regardless of their situation. The emphasis Alberti placed upon design drawings relegated construction to the carrying out of the architect's instructions, and drawings were used to establish geometrical certainty and perfection. Michelangelo believed that 'where the plan is entirely changed in form, it is not only permissible but necessary in consequence entirely to change the adornments and likewise their corresponding portions; the means are unrestricted (and may be chosen) at will (or: as adornments require)'. In emphasizing choice, Michelangelo recovers the process of design from imitation and interpretation of the classical canon, and instead celebrates human attributes such as intuition and perception as essential to creativity.

The relationship of Michelangelo's 'architectural theory' to his working methods leads James Ackerman to study his drawings and models and to conclude that he made a fundamental critique of architectural composition undertaken in drawing lines instead of volumes and mass. 'From the start', Ackerman, suggests, 'he dealt with qualities rather than quantities. In choosing ink washes and chalk rather than pen, he evoked the quality of stone, and the most tentative sketches are likely to contain indications of light and shadow; the observer is there before the building is designed. This determination to locate himself inside a space which he was imagining was a direct critique of the early Renaissance theories of architecture which emphasized ideal mathematical proportions based upon a perfect image of a human body, rather than the experience our bodies offer us in movement in space. '... Michelangelo directed (criticism) against the contemporary system of figural proportion. It emphasized the unit and failed to take into account the effect of the character of forms brought about by movement in architecture, the movement of the observer through and around buildings and by environmental conditions, especially, light. It could produce a paper architecture more successful on the drawing board than in three dimensions.'

The theories of Alberti, Sangallo, di Georgio, Dürer, et al. were concerned with drawings which elicit a cosmic order, seen as inherent in the geometry of the human body. 'When fifteenth century writers spoke of deriving architectural forms from the human body,' Ackerman claims that, 'they did not think of the body as a living organism, but as a microcosm of the universe, a form created in God's image, and created with the same perfect harmony that determines the movement of the spheres or musical consonances. Michelangelo criticized Dürer's proportional system as theoretical 'to the detriment of life', Pérez-Gomez claims in The Perspective Hinge. He quotes Michelangelo's critique: 'He (Dürer) treats only of the measure and kind of bodies, to which a certain rule cannot be given, forming the figures as stiff as stakes; and what matters more, he says not one word concerning human acts and gestures.' Such a shift in focus from intellectual to sensible integrity completes a turn outwards from the enclosed world of the medieval textual space of the Hortus Conclusus and scholastic cloister garden; outwards to an open realm of civil architecture in which corporeal experience and secular city life are championed over religious and metaphorical spaces. Spaces became seen not as the representation of another ideal – such as an image of the garden of paradise – but rather, Ackerman suggests: 'the goal of the architect is no longer to produce an abstract harmony, but rather a sequence of purely visual (as opposed to intellectual) experiences of spatial volumes.'

Ackerman continues to infer that Michelangelo's drawings of mass, rather than indicating correctness of line, can be related directly to his compositional technique. Also, that matter and form are bound together through his working method – that drawing enabled him to think in a new way: 'It is this accent on the eye rather than on the mind that gives precedence to voids over planes.' Ackerman continues to state his case: Michelangelo's drawings 'did not commit him to working in line and plane: shading and indication of projection and recession gave them sculptural mass'.

The modelling of light as a means of orienting one's movement through space is best achieved and revised through model making. Typically, Renaissance architectural competitions were judged by viewing 1:20 models of facades as well as fragments of the building drawn at full scale. The only drawings which existed for fabrication of buildings before the Renaissance were the Modano; 1:1 scale patterns of attic column bases or capitals. The Modani slowly evolved from stage sets into Modello, architectural models, and often full-scale mock-ups of buildings, which enabled architects such as Michelangelo to 'study three-dimensional effects'. Models enable scale to be judged as well as enforce the relationship between materiality and form. They also allow aesthetic decisions to be made, which relate solely to perception. For example, the intellectual matters of expression of structural logic may appear well in an orthographic drawing but be in fact detrimental to the...